Chum Lee packed everything he possessed in
the world in his capacious bamboo bag, slipping
in between the articles of clothing bottles and
pipes and boxes filled with redolent odors. He muttered
and chattered frantically to himself as he
packed, and his hands shook as if with ague. He tied
and knotted a stout rope about the bag and, trembling
and shivering, put on his old sheepskin coat, muskrat
cap and fur mittens. Hoisting the bag upon his
back, Chum Lee hastened on panic-winged feet away
from the camp at Barstairs.
He had awakened from a long doze, in which he
dreamed of summer seas, green as jade, of colorful
sampans, alive with moving, friendly faces; of a girl's
face, oval and soft, with gentle almond eyes, and a
smile like a caress, whose hair was black and smooth
as the wing of a teal, and decked with bridal flowers.
That fair vision of his home and the young wife he
had left in China vanished into the cruel mists of memory.
He awoke to intense cold, the bleakness of death
itself in the one-room bunkhouse. With a sob, the
Chinaman crept out of bed, scurried across the room,
only to find the fire was out, then staggered to the
woodbox. On his way back to the stove, his arms
loaded, he stumbled across something that lay upon
the floor in his path. A loud cry escaped the Chinaman.
The wood dropped from his shivering arms
and clattered down upon the Bar Q "hand." Batt
Leeson lay upon his back, where he had rolled out
of his bunk overnight. His mouth and eyes were
wide open, but did not move or flicker, for Batt was
in his last long sleep.
The sight of the dead man, the last of the "boys"
to succumb to the "black plague," was too much for
the overwrought and drug-weakened Chinaman. Even
the terrors of the zero weather were less appalling to
face than what was inside that shack. Between his
chattering teeth, Chum Lee sent up frantic appeals
to the gods of his ancestors to lift the dreaded curse
which had befallen the land in which he had sojourned
too long.
As he went out of the gate, the long-drawn savage
roar of hungry bulls followed him and, turning back
upon a sudden resolution, Chum Lee shoved the bars
along the sliding doors. He would perform a last
act of charity and win the favor of the gods. The
famished brutes within would come up presently against
the loosened door, and find themselves free from the
prison where they had been confined for days.
That day, bellowing and moaning their unceasing demands
for feed and water, the bulls crashed against
the doors, as the Chinaman had foreseen, and they
gave. The animals crossed a barrier of logs, and with
heads lifted, they sniffed along the corrals and found
the bars which the Chinaman had left down, and strayed
out into the lower pasture. The gate stood wide open
to the highway, and the vast country stretched beyond,
unspeakably desolate under its mantle of deep snow.
Out into the world, in search of that which had been
denied them in their luxurious and costly sheds, went
the famous Hereford bulls.
Pampered and petted, used to being fed almost by
hand, and knowing no range save the sweet home pastures,
how were they likely to fare in the wilderness?
Now the merciless cold of the implacable winter smote
them to the bone, and the unbroken expanse of frozen
snow rose four feet deep in mounds and hillocks on
all sides of them.
There were no nibblings. Streams and rivers were
frozen hard. The wretched cattle swept along the
road huddled together before a blinding wind out of
the hill country, forerunner of a coming Chinook, but
with its first blast intensifying the cold and lashing
the last ounce of strength out of the lost and famished
cattle.
They drifted blindly before the wind, driven against
fence lines and trapped in coulee and gulch. Great
white flakes began to fall like fairy birds drifting in
the dazzling sunlight; like millions of feathers they
fell upon the huddled herd, burying them under a
mighty mound.
The only survivor of all that noble herd was the
bull once known as "Prince Perfection Bar Q the IV,"
of whom the great specialist had predicted that he would
startle the purebred world. Facing the west wind like
a gladiator, the Prince turned from his fellows, and defiantly
trod his way through the storm to where the
outline of the hill country loomed up with its promise
of shelter and food. Sniffing along the road allowances,
pausing only to bellow his immense complaint,
the massive brute pressed on his way.